Making an executable Ruby archive distribution

As a follow-up to my previous post, you can even make a single executable file of your Ruby archive. It relies on the fact that zip files are pretty resilient to extra garbage data in the beginning. Let's say I have two files, lib/greetings.rb and bin/hello.rb. greetings.rb defines a make_hello() function that is used by hello.rb. Here's hello.rb:

require "lib/greetings"

puts "Enter your name:"
name = gets.strip

puts "\n" + make_hello(name)

You can run it like this:

$ ruby bin/hello.rb 
Enter your name:
Steve

Hello, Steve!
$

First, we make a zip file that includes all the required source files:

$ zip -r hello.zip bin lib
  adding: bin/ (stored 0%)
  adding: bin/hello.rb (deflated 11%)
  adding: lib/ (stored 0%)
  adding: lib/greetings.rb (deflated 7%)
$ unzip -l hello.zip 
Archive:  hello.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
        0  02-14-11 21:01   bin/
       98  02-14-11 21:01   bin/hello.rb
        0  02-14-11 20:59   lib/
       46  02-14-11 20:59   lib/greetings.rb
 --------                   -------
      144                   4 files

Now we need a ruby header for the zip file, which we'll put into header.rb:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -rubygems -x

require "zip/ziprequire"
$:.push $0
require "bin/hello.rb"
__END__

It runs the ruby interpreter, which then loads zip/ziprequire, adds itself (which will be the zip file) to the path, and then requires our main file, bin/hello.rb. We now prepend this header to the zip file using cat header.rb hello.zip > hello_tmp.zip. If you now try to run unzip -l on this file, you'll get:

$ unzip -l hello_tmp.zip 
Archive:  hello_tmp.zip
warning [hello_tmp.zip]:  97 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
  (attempting to process anyway)
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
        0  02-14-11 21:01   bin/
       98  02-14-11 21:01   bin/hello.rb
        0  02-14-11 20:59   lib/
       46  02-14-11 20:59   lib/greetings.rb
 --------                   -------
      144                   4 files

We need to fix this zip file to make it valid. Thankfully zip has an option for this:

$ zip --fix hello_tmp.zip --out hellox.zip
Fix archive (-F) - assume mostly intact archive
Zip entry offsets appear off by 97 bytes - correcting...
 copying: bin/
 copying: bin/hello.rb
 copying: lib/
 copying: lib/greetings.rb

We now have a valid zip archive in hellox.zip, we just need to make it executable by running chmod +x hellox.zip. Now your whole application is a single executable file that you can run:

$ ./hellox.zip 
Enter your name:
Mike

Hello, Mike!